Big Data, Big News: 10 Things To See At Hadoop World

Big Data, Big News

This week's O'Reilly Strata and Hadoop World conference in New York has attracted a wide range of IT vendors, from industry leaders like IBM and Hewlett-Packard to companies established in the Hadoop universe like Cloudera and Hortonworks to a wave of young companies with ground-breaking technologies for tackling the "big data" problem.

Here's a quick preview of some of the major news expected to come out of the show that begins Tuesday.

Alteryx 8.0

Alteryx, a developer of strategic analytics software, will be showing the recently unveiled Alteryx 8.0 and its Alteryx Analytics Gallery cloud service the company said enables easy publishing and sharing of analytical applications through public and private cloud services. The Gallery includes 30 "best-practice" analytical applications.

Alteryx Strategic Analytics 8.0 also offers a connector for combining data from Salesforce.com applications with data from other sources, such as databases and social media, for analysis. The new release also includes an entry-level application, Alteryx Strategic Analytics Personal Edition, which provides an easier way for individual analysts to conduct data integration and analysis work.

Datameer 2.1

Datameer, the developer of software that utilizes Hadoop to analyze large data sets, will unveil Datameer 2.1 at the Hadoop World show. The new release's main attraction is that it enables users to save their analysis work as analytical applications.

One of the biggest issues in big data today is the shortage of "data scientists" who can carry out complex analysis tasks on huge volumes of data. This new feature helps analysts capture their expertise so it can be used over and over. Datameer is also launching the Datameer Analytics App Market where data scientists and developers can sell their analytical apps.

Hadapt Adaptive Analytical Platform 2.0

Hadapt, whose data analytics platform natively integrates SQL with Apache Hadoop, will be showing off version 2.0 of its Adaptive Analytical Platform that debuted last week. Hadapt said the new release features the industry's first interactive applications on Hadoop using the company's Hadapt Interactive Query tool. The platform is also integrated with Tableau's business intelligence software.

The new Hadapt Development Kit allows analysts to build custom SQL analytic applications for marketing campaign analysis, full text search, sales funnel analysis, sentiment analysis, pattern matching and predictive modeling.

Kognitio Trialware

Kognitio, developer of an in-memory analytical platform, will announce plans to offer a free "trialware" download of its software with no time restrictions. The free, perpetual-use licenses cover up to 128 GB of data analysis using on-premise or cloud-based systems -- enough to analyze more than 500 million customer records, according to the company.

The offer will allow more companies to add data analysis to their IT systems, according to Kognitio, including Hadoop-based environments. The software can be downloaded from the Amazon Web Services Marketplace for use in the cloud and from the Informatica Marketplace for on-premise software. Kognitio will continue to charge for additional analytical capacity, technical support and other services.

MapR Technologies M7

MapR Technologies is debuting M7, a new release of the company's big data platform that boosts the performance and scalability of HBase, the non-relational database developed as part of the Apache Hadoop project.

With M7, according to the company, big data operations ranging from batch analytics to real-time database functions can be conducted with greater reliability. M7 provides HBase with disaster recovery, full data protection with snapshots and mirroring, and instant recovery from hardware and software failures.

Platfora

Startup Platfora, which has been in "stealth mode" until now, will unveil its in-memory business intelligence software that can directly analyze data in Hadoop without the need for building a complex (and expensive) data warehouse or traditional data store. "This is really the beginning of the end of the data warehouse," said Platfora founder and CEO Ben Werther in an interview.

Platfora's software turns raw data in Hadoop into interactive, in-memory business intelligence for use in visualizations, dashboards and exploratory analytics. "Our target is the everyday business user," Werther said. The software supports all Hadoop distributions, including Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR and Amazon Web Services.

Quest Software Embraces Hadoop

Quest Software, now owned by Dell, is launching three products the company said will help customers more quickly adopt Hadoop and overcome the shortage of people with big data technical and analytical skills.

The first product, Kitenga Analytics, helps businesses analyze structured and unstructured data stored in Hadoop. Toad for Hadoop, a new release of the popular database development and optimization tool, helps database developers and administrators bridge the gap between Hadoop and traditional relational database systems. And, SharePlex with Hadoop capabilities is a release of SharePlex for Oracle that lets administrators move copies of Oracle data to Hadoop for archiving and data analysis.

SiSense Prism

SiSense will demonstrate SiSense Prism, what it calls "the world's smallest big data analytics" system, which is able to crunch 1 TB of data on a laptop computer with only 8 GB of RAM. The company is promoting the product as an alternative to other big data analysis technology, reducing the need for deep technical skills, big budgets and large data warehouse systems.

SiSense Prism uses the vendor's ElastiCube technology and its In-Memory Columnar Datastore. The software also relies on strong data compression, parallel processing and advanced query optimization to carry out its analytical work.

Splunk Offerings For Hadoop

Splunk, a developer of software for real-time operational intelligence, is unveiling two new products the company said address common challenges when deploying and running Hadoop.

Splunk Hadoop Connect provides bi-directional integration between Splunk Enterprise and Hadoop, making it easier to move data between the two. That integration provides a way to import data stored in Hadoop into Splunk. It also makes it easier both to deploy Splunk for real-time data collection, indexing and analysis and to forward information to Hadoop for archiving.

The new Splunk App for HadoopOps (shown at left) provides real-time monitoring and analysis of the health and performance of an entire Hadoop environment.

Tableau Moves To Make "Big Data" More Accessible

Tableau Software, a developer of visual analytics applications, is becoming something of an industry standard for data visualization through its many partnerships with players in the big data industry.

At Hadoop World, Tableau is announcing new or extended partnerships with Cloudera, EMC Greenplum, Hortonworks, DataStax, Hadapt, Digital Reasoning, Karmasphere, Cirro and Simba. Tableau is being integrated with those vendors' products, providing them with visual analysis capabilities.

Tableau already has similar partnerships with Teradata/Aster, HP Vertica, ParAccel, Actian, IBM, MapR and others.